Databases continually grow unless a database administrator drops tables completely, truncates or empties table data, and/or archives and later deletes the table data. While these types of maintenance may be necessary for key application data in databases, it is common for many tables in the databases to be used for purposes which require data to be stored for only a limited time. Such non-critical tables are not part of the key application data themselves, so they pose no real risk to application integrity of the databases if they were deleted. For example, the non-critical tables may include repository tables, monitoring or event monitoring tables, queuing tables, etc.
However, in current database applications, these non-critical tables require maintenance to keep them from growing to unwieldy sizes. Such maintenance is performed separately from the database applications by a database administrator. However, such maintenance is only provided periodically and reactively when it is found that the non-critical tables require such maintenance. In addition, the table maintenance by the database administrator is prone to human error, as well as instances where the database administrator neglects to perform such table maintenance, which may lead to full storage errors. Further, the table maintenance by the database administrator is tedious in that the database administrator has to manually and constantly determine what data to delete and when such data is to be deleted.